Powerpoint can have a lot in common with the linguistic fraud of business jargon. Like the worst jargon, it can mislead. Worse still, it corrupts serious thinking and analysis. It invites listeners to be stupid.

This should be a concern for managers because successful management is about effective communication, and whether it's with individuals or groups, in writing or in spoken words, bad communicators make bad managers.

Unfortunately, relying too much on the technology just highlights these shortcomings. Worse still, PowerPoint has a cognitive style that undermines rigorous analysis, facilitates superficial presentation, and allows the mediocre to hide their flaws behind a facade of smooth presentation. Translating Martin Luther King's famous address, one of the most powerful and eloquent speeches of the 20th century, into PowerPoint shows up the defects of this all-too-standard method of presentation in corporate, academic and government bureaucracies.

King, who was up until 4am on the night before delivery, writing it all in longhand, understood exactly how to use the majesty of spoken words for a cause.

PowerPoint does the exact opposite. King's spine-tingling and elegiac sweep of language is vaporised.

All we are left with is a series of unconnected bullet points, dashes and parentheses.

Peter Norvig, the director of search quality at Google, produced a similar result when he turned PowerPoint loose on Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address (www.norvig.com).

In this triumph of form over content, the material is turned into a sales pitch, sliced and diced with inexact pronouncements, catchy slogans and insignificant evidence and overgeneralisations.

It's just one slide after the other, making it difficult for the listener to understand the context and evaluate causality.

This compressed language of presentation relies heavily on bullet points, tools that reduce complex situations to apparently neat line items. Bullet points might help speakers get themselves organised, but they also dilute information that can be critical to a presentation.

As Tufte points out, it's all "faux-analytical".

In a 1998 study in the Harvard Business Review, 3M's Gordon Shaw and University of Minnesota academics Robert Brown and Philip Bromiley argue that bullets encourage us to be lazy in different ways.

First, they are too generic and ignore specifics. Secondly, they leave critical relationships unspecified and list only three logical relationships: sequence (first to last); priority (least to most important and vice versa) and simple membership (where the items relate to one another in some unstated way).

Because a bullet point list can only display one of these relationships at a time and because it can't specify critical relationships among issues, people cannot see the whole picture.

As an example, the authors cite three major objectives from the standard five-year plan:

- Increase the company's market share by 25 per cent.

- Increase profits by 30 per cent.

- Increase new product introductions to 10 a year.

The plan does not spell out how these objectives fit together. Indeed, these three simple points can represent different strategies.

Does improved marketing, for example, boost market share, which results in increased profits, which in turn funds new product development?

Or is it that new product development increases market share and profits?

Or do windfall profits fund the marketing required to achieve increased market share and drive new product development?

Admittedly, I have seen very good presentations on PowerPoint.

Okay, just one or two, but they were good.

Still, that was because these talks involved a fine speaker with great content.